Nixon ignored pleas to put man who became Deep Throat in charge of FBI

Thursday

Nov 29, 2007 at 12:01 AMNov 29, 2007 at 12:49 PM

Deep in Richard Nixon's White House files sit letters from a long-forgotten lobbying campaign to make Mark Felt head of the FBI. Instead, Felt became Deep Throat.

Deep in Richard Nixon's White House files sit letters from a long-forgotten lobbying campaign to make Mark Felt head of the FBI. Instead, Felt became Deep Throat.

The National Archives released more than 10,000 pages of documents from the Nixon presidency yesterday and among them are the urgings of past and present FBI agents and other interested citizens to appoint Felt, then the No. 2 FBI official, as director. Associates described his "outstanding loyalty."

The documents, also shedding light on foreign and national security policy from the Nixon years, show increasing urgency in U.S. attempts to pacify the Middle East, alarm over Israel's apparent progress in developing nuclear weapons and a wish to "manipulate relations with Saudis" to help broker peace. U.S. officials are also seen weighing whether to support a Kurdish rebellion in Iraq.

To combat the terrorist threat in the Mideast, the U.S. must focus on "political dialogue," said a March 1973 directive now echoed in this week's Mideast summit.

Nixon, soon to be consumed by the Watergate investigation, passed over career agents including Felt when he selected loyalist L. Patrick Gray as FBI chief after the J. Edgar Hoover's death in 1972, just weeks before the Watergate break-in. Gray resigned the next year because of allegations he had destroyed Watergate documents.

Felt's supporters weighed in, with letters, telegrams and cards that have been in Nixon's White House files all these years.

"He has the integrity, the ability, the experience and the image to insure that our FBI will continue to deserve and maintain world esteem," Harold L. Child Jr., legal attache to the embassy in Japan and a 30-year FBI veteran, told Nixon in an April 1973 letter.

Efton A. Stanfield, a former FBI special agent who was then an executive of the electrical contractors' association, asked Nixon in a telegram to turn to the career professional to replace Gray.

"Mr. Felt is a man of outstanding loyalty, character, reputation, habits," he said. The "fidelity, bravery, and integrity of Mr. Felt are unquestioned."

Felt himself was the lead agent in a telegram sent to the White House by a group of agents asking that a highly qualified professional be nominated. The police chief in Kodiak, Alaska, made the case for Felt, and so did ordinary citizens.

Writing from Brooklyn, N.Y., Viena K. Neaville told Nixon that choosing Felt would be good for him because, "You would be spared the tremendous aggravation to which you are subjected by so many factions."

Nixon was spared no grief. He eventually chose William Ruckelshaus, who served at FBI only briefly.

Deep Throat's identity remained a mystery until Felt stepped forward in 2005 to acknowledged his clandestine role in bringing down Nixon.

Bob Woodward of The Washington Post said he first spoke with Felt about Watergate two days after the break-in.

Also in the files:

—National security adviser Henry Kissinger is urged to respond to pleas from the shah of Iran to support Kurdish rebels in Iraq. "Even if we were to decide to help them, I would assume we would want our hand to be hidden," Harold Saunders, a deputy, told him in a June 1972 memo.

—Vice President Dick Cheney's resume and application for an unspecified administration job in 1969, when he was 28. The ambitious Cheney listed a dozen jobs he'd had so far, including a university tutoring position for which he had been paid 75 cents an hour, and acknowledged two convictions for driving under the influence in his early 20s.

—Memos about Elvis Presley's Dec. 21, 1970, visit with Nixon to offer his support for the administration's drug-fighting and other crime efforts. He presented Nixon with a commemorative World War II Colt 45 pistol, encased in a wooden chest.

"You were particularly kind to remember me with this impressive gift, as well as your family photographs, and I am delighted to have them for my collection of special mementos," Nixon wrote.

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